If the legal marketing strategy for your law firm is based on online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing a share of your stable of clients, you will need to create content.
Content is an essential part of legal marketing, without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. But producing content means hard work, and you need to make the best of the writing that you can produce. Following are several suggestions for making sure you use two of the most popularly produced types of legal marketing content as effectively as you can.
Law Firm Marketing – Written material (blogs, email alerts, brochures, guides, information sheets)
If you’ve created any quality, interesting material of any of the formats mentioned, you don’t need to only send it off once or print it and let it stagnate in your reception area. Distribute the content as much as possible. For each piece of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded to my website?
- Have I sent it directly to referrers, associates and other professionals?
- Have I linked to it with a post on Facebook and a tweet on Twitter?
- Has it been sent to media contacts?
- Are others in my firm aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client questions them about it?
- Can I transform it into a different kind of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally written with a particular reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented once and then left to become stale. All of that effort and time required to prepare it results in only a one time showing. If you want to get much more benefit from your presentation consider:
- Who else may I present it to?
- How could I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, or offered to present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send the presentation in hard copy to those who were unable to attend the seminar?
- Could I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it electronically online or directly?
- Can I write an article or blog to discuss questions that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
While some of these ideas may feel like more work just when you’ve probably damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it’s necessary to remember that it’s far easier to use a small amount of time now to really maximise on the impression you’ve already produced than to produce a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the benefits of all the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you need to create content you will feel more confident about how effective the results will be.
John Gray is a practising lawyer and the Senior Marketer at John Gray Marketing, an Australian specialist law firm and legal marketing consultancy. If you are interested in law marketing, legal marketing and marketing for lawyers, contact John Gray today.